Irish Literary Fiction

Ireland, 1959. Young Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, who roams with his father and extended family from town to town, carrying all their worldly possessions in their wagons. Christy carries with him a burden of guilt as well: his mother's death in childbirth. The wandering life is the only one Christy has ever known, but when his grandfather dies, everything changes. His father decides to settle briefly, in a town, where Christy and his cousin can receive proper schooling. But still, always, they are treated as outsiders.

As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo's fraternal enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum. When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll - Cillian's bruised, sullen, teenage brother - in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins, goaded by his dead mother's dog and struck by spinning lights, Dev is unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy.

In January 1895 Henry James anticipates the opening of his first play, Guy Domville, in London. The production fails, and he returns, chastened and humiliated, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost. In The Master Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man who circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, who was astonishingly vibrant and alive in his art, and yet whose attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.

" Firefly Summer is warm, humorous, sad and happy. Reading it is a joy." ( Irish Independent) In the summer of 1962, an American millionaire arrives in a small, sleepy Irish town with far-reaching consequences. For the children of the Ryan family, the long hot summers are usually spent playing in the ruins of a large, abandoned house. But when the American, Patrick O'Neill, buys the ruins, dreams are made and broken and secrets which should never be revealed are betrayed.

In this award-winning collection, listeners will find spellbinding stories of loss, absence, and the devastating effects of chance - of what happens when the unthinkable bad luck of other people, of other towns, becomes our bad luck, our town. Taut, lucid, and engrossing, provocative and dark - and often darkly funny - these stories have much to offer the lover of literary fiction as well as the listener who just loves a great story.

Everyone is thinking about Julius King. For comfortable, long-married Hilda and Rupert, he is a mystery. For Morgan, Hilda’s tormented sister, he is an obsession. For Morgan’s abandoned husband, Tallis, he is the source of ruin. For Simon and Axel, deeply in love, he stirs up jealousy and unease. What is Julius thinking about? He’s thinking about Hilda, Rupert, Morgan, Tallis, Simon and Axel, and they will not all survive his malevolent attention.

Early one October morning, Grace’s mother snatches her from sleep and brutally cuts off her hair, declaring, 'You are the strong one now.' With winter close at hand and Ireland already suffering, Grace is no longer safe at home. And so her mother outfits her in men’s clothing and casts her out. When her younger brother Colly follows after her, the two set off on a remarkable odyssey in the looming shadow of their country’s darkest hour.

After the tragic loss of his wife, Helen, Luke Hansard is desperate to keep her memory alive. In an effort to stay close to her, he reaches out to an online friend Helen often mentioned: a reclusive photographer with a curious interest in beautiful but broken objects. But first he must find her - and she doesn’t want to be found. Orla Kendrick lives alone in the ruins of a remote Suffolk castle, hiding from the haunting past that has left her physically and emotionally scarred.

An enemies to lovers romance.Connor is in mourning for his deceased wife and two young daughters, and now he's been accused of murdering their killer. Laura is his court appointed attorney. She's struggling to justify a loveless marriage and a career filled with moral conflict. This is her first big murder case and the media is all over it - the Celtic Vigilante. Connor has become a local celebrity. Laura has to win him an acquittal but Connor isn't making that easy. He's resistant to all of her ideas, and he clearly dislikes everything about Laura, including her defense strategy. And yet ...

As a widowed mother of three, new love seems impossible for Freya - until she meets Duncan, and suddenly she feels alive again. While Freya’s older children are less than welcoming, six-year-old Sophie helps Duncan find his place in the family - but even Sophie harbours fears that threaten to overshadow any chance of a new start. The past is hard to leave behind when pictures of Freya’s idolised late husband hang in every room, and the more Duncan tries to find the source of Sophie’s anxiety, the more he is convinced that Reuben was not the perfect husband and father Freya remembers.

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" - ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and "bad apples": the Greens.

Other people find Majella odd. She keeps herself to herself, she doesn't like gossip and she isn't interested in knowing her neighbours' business. But suddenly everyone in the small town in Northern Ireland where she grew up wants to know all about hers. Since her da disappeared during the Troubles, Majella has tried to live a quiet life with her alcoholic mother.

Lisa’s dated a series of disastrous men; Simon’s loved and lost the girl of his dreams. She’s hoping fate might intervene in her love life; he’d prefer that it stopped meddling with his. Today, they’re meeting, courtesy of the local paper’s ‘Blind Date’ feature - but while Lisa’s looking for that elusive ‘spark’, Simon’s sure lightning doesn’t strike twice. Will theirs be a love that’s written in the stars, or merely another mismatch written up in the Gazette?

When Prince Oroonoko's passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. Oroonoko's noble bearing soon wins the respect of his English captors, but his struggle for freedom brings about his destruction. Inspired by Aphra Behn's visit to Surinam, Oroonoko reflects the author's romantic view of native peoples as noble savages in 'the first state of innocence, before man knew how to sin'.

Nell - funny, brave and so much loved - is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell's leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel's famous father, an Irish poet of beautiful words and brutal actions.

McCormack's myth-tinged debut novel gives us the unforgettable Crowe and his endlessly curious and self-mythologizing stories. Crowe is born in the remote village of Furnace in the West of Ireland and raised by his grandfather, a man of "madness and bullying love", who teaches him grim lessons about existence. Entirely silent until his third birthday, Crowe becomes an observant and isolated teenager, eventually leaving Furnace for university in a "wrong-footed" and bewildering city. There he meets a woman who will change his life and outlook.

Old friends meet up on a summer's evening at a Dublin restaurant. Both are now married with grown-up children, and their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy, a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be. Neither Davy nor Joe know what the night has in store, but as two pints turns to three, then five, and the men set out to revisit the haunts of their youth, the ghosts of Dublin entwine around them.

In the bustling world of Dublin's advertising scene, Kitty O’Sullivan, a copywriter, feels an unexplainable void in her life that she can't quite pinpoint. Her five-year relationship with Dave is stagnant, her creative juices have dried up and she’s even entertaining thoughts of marriage as a cure-all! Something’s missing from her life but she can’t work out exactly what it is…When Dave decides to take time out from ‘them’, Kitty finds herself momentarily liberated to explore life and have some fun. She and best friend Shazza are corralled into joining a five-aside football team.

"Apeirogon", n.m. : figure géométrique au nombre infini de côtés. Rami Elhanan est israélien, fils d'un rescapé de la Shoah, ancien soldat de la guerre du Kippour ; Bassam Aramin est palestinien, et n'a connu que la dépossession, la prison et les humiliations. Tous deux ont perdu une fille. Abir avait dix ans, Smadar, treize ans.

A stunning debut novel from the Northern Irish poet Eoghan Walls, The Gospel of Orla is the coming-of-age story of a young girl, Orla, and the man she meets who has an astonishing and unique ability.